Real Tors: Realtors Scared of Zillow and Some Work

There is a reason the realtor association is having to advertise on national TV. They have been ripping off American for 20 years. Five percent to sell your home? $15,000 on a $300,000 home is outrageous. What do you get for that? A few pictures in a weekly handout, a sign in the front yard, and Sunday open houses. The person that sells your house gets half, that is unless you find the buyers. They will also represent you at the closing. I can’t forget you get listed on MLS listings so others can see that your house is for sale. Sounds like a great bargain. Here’s what you can do with that kind of money. Pay someone to set up a website and buy a front yard sign that has the website on it. Pay $500 and have your home listed on an MLS listing. A realtor will tell you you can’t do that but I did and here is the type of site that will do it for you. Second, in order to figure out a price you don’t need a realtor, go to the site zillow.com and you can easily figure out your home’s worth. Now you still have $14,000 left. Your real estate lawyer will cost you $500 and will take care of all the paperwork needed to sell your home and will come to closing with you as well to make sure everything goes well. To advertise the sale of your home you could do any of the following. Run ads in the paper for about $250 a pop or $500 for a nice size color depending on where you live. You also can get a 30 second commercial produced for $500 from a local TV station. Then it will cost you $70-200 for a thirty second commercial on Sunday morning or any morning for that matter. Yes that money can add up but how many homes do you see advertised on TV? Put this all together and you can sell your house for very cheap. You might have to show some people your home and may have to stay home on Sundays but you will save a ton of money and most likely have a good time doing it. I am not the “do it myself” kind of guy. I pay people to do most things in my house from electrical to plumbing because even at their rates, by the time I fool around with it and do it half ass, I could have paid someone to do it right and probably paid the same amount when I put a value on my time. When it came to selling my house the numbers were just too big to not try. I ended up selling my home in 1 week by giving back half of what the realtor fees would have been to the buyer. I didn’t have to even run ads. I never got past putting up a sign, paying $50 to put up info and pictures of my house on a website, and having one open house. Maybe it alway isn’t this easy and maybe you don’t have the time to show people your home or take phone calls. There are some who want to use a realtor. In that case you can still offer to pay a realtor 2% to find a buyer. Either way realtors are a rip off for anyone that values money. Realty fees will be cut in half or more in the next 5 years. Mark my words.